HEALTH INSURANCE

Have you noticed how health insurance is like a hospital gown: every
time you turn around, you find something that isn't covered? But
health researchers are discovering what many people have known all
along -- that getting healthy is about more than medicine and
treatment. It also involves a healthy outlook on life.

Various studies have validated the mind/ body connection. Cancer is
often diagnosed within months of the death of one's spouse. People
who are cynical or angry have been shown to be more prone to heart
attacks than those with a more positive outlook. And former Saturday
Evening Post editor Norman Cousins has demonstrated for years how
humor, laughter and hope can aid the healing process.

Not only is a healthy mental outlook necessary, but a healthy
spiritual outlook seems to be equally important. Noted psychologist
Carl Jung (1865-1961) made a telling observation about the
connection between one's mental health and spiritual outlook.
"During the past 30 years, people from all civilized countries of
the earth have consulted me," he said. "Among all my patients in the
second half of life -- that is to say, over 35 -- there has not been
one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a
(spiritual) outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of
them fell ill because he had lost that which living religions of
every age have given to their followers.."

A healthy person is not one with a certain lifestyle, a certain
income or certain favorable circumstances. A healthy person is
usually one with certain attitudes. Positive mental attitudes and
fruitful spiritual attitudes are part of it. One might say that a
robust spiritual outlook is good health insurance.

-- Steve Goodier